Digital Home Thoughts: Selling Audio Players with Songs Still on Them?

"NY Times reporter John Schwartz has an interesting article about how he learned so much more about a co-worker after buying the guy's iPod. There were still about 3,000 songs on the iPod, and Schwartz spent some time listening to many of them -- even discovering some bands or songs that he liked quite a bit (to the point of wanting to go out and buy the CDs himself). While it's interesting to see how listening in on someone else's iPod is a way to learn more about them, a much bigger question may be about the legality of selling an iPod with music on it. Sure, the seller can claim they're just selling the device, but considering that the recording industry freaks out if anyone shares a song for free, let alone profits from selling a song, it certainly seems like Schwartz' colleague, Kenneth Chang, has just opened himself up to a tremendous lawsuit. If the recording industry is going after people for sharing music for free, why not selling iPods full of music for just the cost of the iPod?"

This seems so cut and dried to me, it's not even funny - selling an audio player full of music is no different than selling a laptop or PDA full of installed programs that you paid for, then re-installing them on your new device: it's not legal. The New York Times article is whimsical and cute, and from a sociological standpoint I loved it, but the repercussions of this are going to be bad. Very bad. How bad you might ask? Here's my prediction: within six months, the RIAA will have one of their puppet US senators introduce a bill, or perhaps an amendment to a current bill, that will try to prohibit the resale of hard-drive and flash-based audio playback devices, period.

Forget about whether or not there's content on them - the RIAA will use this as an excuse to try and stop the resale of audio players. Remember, these are the crazy fools who tried to stop the sale of used CDs because they weren't earning royalties twice on them. :roll: